Meet the Real Northern Alliance: Anti-Taliban forces are portrayed by the major media as gallant "freedom fighters," yet various factions are guilty of crimes ranging from drug trafficking to civilian massacres. (Afghanistan).

On November 9th, after weeks of American bombing, the Northern Alliance finally overwhelmed Taliban defenses and captured the city of Mazar-e-Sharif in northeastern Afghanistan. Both President Bush and Pakistani President Musharraf, at a joint news conference the following day, cautioned the Northern Alliance not to take Kabul, because they feared that the Northern Alliance might carry out atrocities in the Afghan capital. The "international community," moreover, intended to clear the way for a United Nations-installed multiethnic government to replace the Taliban, and viewed a Northern Alliance regime as an obstacle. But despite the warnings, the Northern Alliance promptly moved south and swept into Kabul, which the Taliban had abandoned, only four days later.

Following the victory, Americans were subjected to a barrage of rosy press stories about our victorious allies and the restoration of freedom to the oppressed citizens of Kabul. Wrote AP reporter Kathy Gannon, "In the streets of Kabul, thousands of people celebrated, honking car horns and ringing bicycle bells. They flouted the strict version of Islamic law imposed by the Taliban that regulated almost every aspect of life, down to banning shaving and music."

Who are these supposed heroic freedom fighters, our collaborators in the War on Terrorism? The Northern Alliance is in fact a diffuse coalition of warlords, ex-Army generals, and tribal leaders united only in their hatred of the Taliban. The Alliance controlled Afghanistan prior to the Taliban takeover in 1996, with devastating results. As British journalist Robert Fisk observed, "from 1992 to 1996, the Northern Alliance was a symbol of massacre, systematic rape and pillage." With the recent military victories, Afghanistan has essentially returned to pre-Taliban political geography, with the Taliban themselves once again concentrated in the area of their original southern stronghold, Kandahar.

Preeminent among Northern Alliance leaders is Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek and ex-Army general for Afghanistan's Communist government. Dostum's stomping ground, Mazar-e-Sharif, was his personal fiefdom from 1992 to 1997, and his men have a particularly unsavory reputation for looting and pillaging. The last time his forces wrested Mazar-e-Sharif from the Taliban, in 1997, Dostum's forces massacred over 2,000 Taliban prisoners, including some who were thrown into wells and then blown apart by hand grenades tossed in with them. In the wake of Dostum's latest victory in Mazar-e-Sharif, both UN and International Red Cross workers reported widespread looting of food aid and atrocities against civilians. Dostum's men seized a convoy of 10 trucks carrying tents and water pumps as well as 89 tons of food from UN warehouses. International aid workers, meanwhile, buried hundreds of bodies, including victims of Northern Alliance reprisals.

Dostum himself is a colorful figure, known for punishing his soldiers by tying them to tank treads and driving around until their bodies are ground into mincemeat. One reporter who visited Dostum's compound for an interview saw the grisly evidence of one such recent execution still scattered around the yard.

Another Afghan opposition leader, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was Afghanistan's president from 1992 to 1996. His Jamiat-i-Islami faction, the largest group in the Northern Alliance, has reoccupied Kabul. They've been there before: During Rabbani's previous tenure in office, rival factions laid waste to the Afghan capital and killed roughly 50,000 people, mostly civilians.

Then there's Yunus Khalis, a radical Muslim cleric who controls the area around Jalalabad and claims to be independent of both the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, though he has sided with the latter in the past. His recent "victory" over the local Taliban appears in fact to have been a devil's bargain: The Taliban handed control of the city to him, in return for which he allowed them to keep all their weapons. Khalis, like the Taliban, is deeply anti-Western and a strong supporter of bin Laden.

Khalis' former comrade-at-arms, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is another radical Islamicist. Though he lives in exile in Iran, his forces are one of the largest and best-organized of the mujabideen groups. They should be: Hekmatyar was once the CIA's fair-haired boy in Afghanistan, trained to lead the anti-Soviet mujahideen forces and groomed to be the leader of Afghanistan after the Soviets left. But Hekmatyar has shown himself to be a ruthless opportunist. Soon after the Soviet occupation ended, he allied himself with the defense minister of Afghanistan's Communist President Najibullah in an unsuccessful coup attempt. More recently, he has forged an alliance with Communist warlord Dostum and has also been supporting Islamic extremists in Tajikistan and Kashmir.

All of Afghanistan's rival factions do have one interest in common, though: sustaining that nation's massive drug trade. When Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a new $43 million package of U.S. aid to the Taliban last May, he referred specifically to the radical Islamic regime's ban on opium cultivation as "a decision ... that we welcome." But in fact the Taliban, as well as bin Laden's al-Qaeda and our Northern Alliance allies, rely heavily on the income from heroin and hashish production to finance their respective militaries.

Even during the days of the CIA's involvement with the anti-Soviet mujahideen, the American government turned a blind eye to the drug trafficking. "Often... the convoys of donkeys and trucks that smuggled arms to the mujahedeen returned to Pakistan with raw opium, sometimes with the assent of the Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance," wrote Tim Golden of the New York Times. Today, Afghanistan is one of the world's top heroin producers, with hundreds of thousands of acres of poppy fields under cultivation. Up to 20 percent of American heroin comes from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and in Great Britain, police estimate that 90 percent of all heroin on British streets is of Afghan origin. Cynthia Watts of the Village Voice recently wrote that "the careening wartime economy has spurred Afghan civilians to re-embrace the drug trade. Farmers are tilling the fields to prepare for the winter crop, chemists are setting up labs in caves and the backs of trucks, and family men are riskin g their freedom to sneak heroin across the border. As the Taliban dumps an estimated 4000 tons of stockpiled opium on the world market, the Northern Alliance continues to export a hefty share through Tajikistan into Russia and beyond."

Despite the terrorism, drug trafficking, and constantly shifting alliances, the United Nations, backed heavily by the American military, is now proposing to set up an international protectorate in Afghanistan. And although the victorious Northern Alliance has warned the UN that an international peacekeeping force is unnecessary, the globalists are already preparing to occupy the country. UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is working to set up a multinational peacekeeping force composed of both Muslim troops from Turkey and Jordan and Europeans. Additional forces from the United States, Russia, and Afghanistan's neighbors will be brought in to "monitor" the creation of a new Afghan government. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, meanwhile, pleaded with Afghanistan's neighbors to stop jockeying for influence by arming Afghanistan's various warring factions.

These, then, are our newest buddies-at-arms. Like our allies in the last American war prior to the War on Terrorism -- the KLA Albanian terrorists of Kosovo -- the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban factions in Afghanistan have undergone a remarkable face-lift. From maligned terrorists, Communists, drug dealers, and religious fanatics, they have been transformed by Establishment spin doctors into "freedom fighters," who, with the help of American and UN intervention, will supposedly turn Afghanistan into a peaceful paragon of democracy. In reality Afghanistan will become, like Kosovo before it, a poster child for the new world order, a perpetual sinkhole of warfare, terrorism, and drug trafficking under the permanent supervision of the United Nations.